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Comment by elzbardico | Hacker News Reader

> The federal government never asked for the so-called information operations campaign, nor did cabinet authorize the initiative

Plausible deniability. So, yes, sure, the generals decided to do this putting their careers at risk if/when discovered.

And when the civilian government found this out, where was the indignant outrage that we could expect for what was clearly military insubordination?

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Not even "plausible deniability". They don't even need to ask for these things off the record because the generals are not idiots. They know what their bosses want well enough that nobody need ask. You see this behavior all throughout government.

"anticipatory obedience"

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vorauseilender_Gehorsam

Sadly the article only exists in German because, well, the most well known example of it is how people acted under Hitler.

This is, in fact, a very obvious and well known facet of management technique in the white collar world. Often, when faced with a hard or completely distasteful call, it's possible to structure your communication on a way that you never actually tell anyone to do the thing, but it gets done anyway.

It is a cornerstone that marks the difference between an exec who can and an exec who cannot CYA.

This is also why "Can I get that in writing", or asking something outright in an email is a fantastic way to corner a squirrely exec.

I see links to Japanese and Chinese too. Can't use them, though.

Anyway, https://www.deepl.com/translator works perfectly via cut&paste from .de to English for this.

It doesn't work like that here. Our PM is not the commander in chief.

If the head of the Executive and Legislature is not in charge of the government who is? The Governor-General may officially be the Executive but that's a rubber stamp, not an effective constraint on the power of the Prime Minister. Reality and legal forms are not the same thing.

In Canada, the doctrine of parliamentary supremacy is the rule. A written Constitution is a recent addition. In a minority parliament, the legislature can be a very effective check in reality. Executive (Crown powers) are also distributed by the Governor General to the entire cabinet. Depending on the relative strength of the politician, they are technically colleague — unlike the American system where they work for the president. The Canadian prime minister are usually in fact and in legal form “first among equals.”

Time to buy stocks in Canadian shredder companies...

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